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Chris Jordan is a photographer and artist making bold statements with images. At about the 7 minute 30 second mark he calls the statistics surrounding prescription drug consumption, imprisonment, and breast augmentation surgeries "atrocities" in our culture. Is he right?  Since I teach teenage girls and see their daily struggles (not to mention that I vividly remember my own), the stats on breast augmentation surgeries for women under the age of 21, and given as a gift for high school graduation.... well, I'm not sure what to say. Once we have gotten past our first five days and students have set up their initial tech, critical research, and analysis skills; I'd really love to dive into history with these images of today's statistics.  The lesson is that we have arrived at this place because of our history.  My job is to teach kids the history and to help them understand how it affected the present.  Their job is to help create change that will move us in a ...

A web is made up of interconnected strands. The strands are somewhat strong on their own, but together they are capable of much more. For example, if one strand breaks, the others can bear the extra stress for a while until it is repaired. If several strands are broken, though, the entire web is at risk. Source: geograph This giant rock, Earth, and all the people sitting on it make up the ultimate web.  Although the Internet, the other "web", is a big part of what connects us, it is really just a part of the greater global web. Other strands that make up our global web include food supply, environmental health, trade and economics, and energy. In order for our global web to remain strong, all people on Earth need access to all of these things and more. Source: Global Energy Network Institute If our students are to grow into adults who can understand and contribute to the strength of the global web, we must be sure that they are global citizens who have a firm gra...

Human beings tend to either fear what they don't understand or to make their own far-fetched assumptions. In 18th and 19th centuries, this was certainly true between Americans and Japanese.  Some of the interpretations of the culture and people across the Pacific are comical.  The best way to help our students understand this historical perspective is through the eyes of the people who were living at the time.  Visual primary sources are the go-to resource.  All of the primary source images in this post are from John W. Dower's essay "Black Ships and Samurai" on MIT's Visualizing Cultures database . Historical Perspective I love these simple charts from The Historical Thinking Project . Both would be helpful when implementing this lesson. The first helps students to put aside their modern bias because they have grown up in a time of instant communication and technological fashion. The second helps students compare historical perspectives that are at odds w...

After attending this summer's Primary Source institute  in July, I was in a bit of a conundrum.  I wanted to introduce the idea of soft power to ALL of my students, but my freshmen do not study the era that we focused on in the institute, which was after 1898.  So, after much thought, some research, and one proposal submission, I managed to come up with a way to integrate soft power into the discussion of the United States government's first attempts at foreign relations in the late 18th century. The entire lesson can be found at Soft Power in the Early Republic: The U.S. and France . First of all, what is soft power ?  Since most adults have not heard of the term, it is even less likely that the average teenager in my classroom is familiar with it.  It was coined by Joseph Nye in his 2004 book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics .  Rather than ask the students to read  the book, I plan to show them a clip of the beginning of this...